Caligatha Read online

  Caligatha

  By Matt Spire

  Thank you:

  Matthew Dabson for being the kind of lifelong friend everyone should have and the first person to read this book.

  ***

  JD Saris for the millions of shared schemes and debates. It would be terribly insufficient to say my thinking and writing are better for them. I think I owe you a drink or two.

  ***

  Steven Neal for the incredibly insightful suggestions that made this a much, much better book.

  For my lovely wife Amanda, who believes in me more than is reasonable, has at least as much talent, and brought the cat into my life who really wrote this whole damn thing.

  1

  Tomb

  After a sleepless night communing with his dead wife, Eric watches the world pass from the backseat with heavy eyes.

  He'd sneaked out and borrowed this very truck, driven for an hour to the mausoleum, and unsealed Sofia's visage from the nutrient vat within her marble obelisk.

  And for what? He wasted precious time. Every second spent awake brings her nervous system further beyond repair.

  Eric jolts as Crane abruptly swings the dilapidated pickup into a small parking space, a perfect cube cut out of the pristine white walls of a loft. The exterior seems unaffected by time, save a broken front door and excess foliage draping through the bedroom's shattered glass window. A single tendril reaches past the balcony railing and sways in the breeze just above their windshield.

  Crane gave them nothing. No directions, allowed little gear. The only radio is in Crane's ear.

  Eric traveled to tell Sofia that Crane had become obsessed with these unexplained missions, but she sensed his despair before he uttered a word.

  Another year, Sofia had said, struggling to part her cracked lips. Just keep paying the jackals. One more year.

  So he'd spent the time lying instead. He told Sofia how close Crane was to having a cure, how he was saving enough money to buy the mausoleum from the jackals, until she'd lost the energy to listen. He resealed the obelisk while she slept, leaving her to an even deeper sleep, and stepped into the graveyard, passing the more peaceful dead to meet the dawn with a heavy heart.

  One more year.

  He forces himself to dispel the memory of her hairless scalp and gaunt face.

  Pay attention.

  He scans the loft. Eric has been through hundreds of these abandoned homes. Here, there are no stinging nettles or jumping cholla planted along the pathway to deter unwelcome guests, just an interior full of robust flora. No one is squatting inside.

  In the backseat by Eric, Mae slips a flashlight attachment onto her rifle.

  Eric grips the shotgun on his lap, watching the back of Crane's head. Already strapped to Crane's back is a flattened bag. A flashlight is holstered to his hip. Otherwise, he's empty.

  “No one's home,” Eric breathes.

  Crane doesn't take the bait, doesn't mutter a syllable about what's inside.

  He'd called this a typical sweep. More of the same bullshit.

  Before, Eric intercepted shipments of medicine or performed solitary reconnaissance, at least pocketing whatever currency he found to pay the jackals.

  There was nothing here. These modern lofts were the disemboweled remnants of urban convenience. Looters passed through decades ago like a swarm of ants, picking every bit of human gristle in mere days and leaving flimsy architectural bones for a more patient earth to digest.

  One more year.

  Crane presses his fingers to the radio in his ear. “Go,” he says, and the three head to the front door.

  The doorknob is missing, and the door shudders against the light breeze, groaning on its loose hinges. Without warning, Crane throws it open and steps into the dark.

  Eric clenches his jaw at the reckless entry, but he and Mae follow, stumbling over the twisted remains of a screen door that's made its way indoors. Mae stifles a curse and turns on her light.

  Inside, the loft is like every other abandoned home. Overturned, rotting furniture awakens in their beams, spindly shadows stalking them step by step on the yellow, water-stained walls. To their left, open kitchen cabinets and broken bottles. The skeletons of what might have been a family of possums draped across an island countertop. To the right, a face-down bookcase and the sunken frame of a sofa. The floor is plastered with so much old paper it's formed a brittle second layer over the hardwood.

  Crane pulls out his own flashlight and paces the kitchen, a shell of paper cracking under his boots.

  Mae's light stops beside him. A giant, warped painting rests against the wall beside a hearth. The fireplace and surrounding floor is blackened with soot. Another possum skeleton rests in ashes.

  “Well done,” she says. “Yum.”

  Crane roots through the cabinets as Mae heads deeper into the living area, towards a staircase.

  Eric stares at the painting. The sunken canvas looks like an ancient map, the sort cartographers designed before explorers dared venture beyond the four corners filled with admonitions of darkness and monsters, but perhaps the continents had decayed on the canvas into shapeless, earthy brown froth after years of ruin. It was fitting enough. Darkness and monsters now pushed back against the torches.

  “The stairs are good,” Mae says, and they ascend to the second floor.

  The bedroom is much brighter, covered in leaves and tendrils and the floor itself appears to have turned into a mossy soil. Vines have crept from window-to-window along the ceiling, spilling halfway onto a rotted bed, the only furniture other than another bookcase and a desk.

  A breeze flows through the windows, weighted by a caustic stench.

  Crane and Mae examine the bed and bookcase as Eric walks to the bathroom.

  On the door is a partial handprint in dried blood. No patterns. Gloved.

  “Mae,” he calls.

  Eric presses his body against the door, leaning in slowly, shotgun to the ceiling. Rotten air pours out, and broken shards of mirror glint from the sink basin.

  Legs are draped over the bathtub.

  “Mae,” he says again, and her light shines into the bathroom from behind.

  The man in the tub is a drifter with ragged clothes and one soleless shoe. From the looks of his blistered skin, he's been here a few days. The left arm is missing, but bandaged; he must've been dealing with that for a while. His head, a mess of beard and congealed blood, hangs at an impossible angle, cut deep at the throat all the way to the vertebra. Around him a porcelain halo shines black-red.

  “He was killed in the tub,” Mae says. “Not much blood on the floor.”

  “Surveyors,” Eric tells her. “That's the work of a cutlass. He spooked 'em, pissed 'em off.”

  A cigarette butt rests upright on his chest, and around it a hole burned through his shirt.

  “Yeah, Surveyors,” Mae spits. “Steady enough to use the blade of their gun, vile enough turn him into an ashtray.”

  They backtrack into the bedroom, where Crane is holding a leather-bound book.

  “I hope you found what you're looking for,” Eric tells him. “The Guard sent—”

  “Surveyors two days ago, yes. Look what they missed.”

  He hands them the book, its pages unsoiled and crisp.

  ***

  If you're reading this, I am sorry.

  The likelihood of your existence is exceeded by the probability of any one particular human sperm successfully reaching its mate. Or at least that's how Jericho explained things. His eyes glazed, fork suspended midair, forgetting the unchewed watercress in his mouth.

  Don't bet on that baby, he slurred.

  I'd said something about only one, any one, needing to survive to create life. Jericho rolls his eyes in this memory. He says something about th
e only thing certain is getting fucked.

  “A big, sloppy...” and he stared at his fork as though he'd forgotten a word. “Mess. Miracle of life.”

  I am sorry. Even then, I was not thinking of you. I did not think of you until this final moment.

  If nothing else, I owe you an explanation—how all this lifeless ruin is due to one man, a man so wrecked on guilt and drugs and sleepless nights he may well be insane. Why we've left you behind. But I don't know where to begin.

  I owe my life to Jericho, twice over, but we never agreed on much. Never those fundamental questions of human destiny. The whys of life.

  I remember all of it. There's not a detail I've forgotten. I keep piecing the conversations together, again and again, expecting a pattern to emerge.

  Sometimes I believe there is nothing more human than forgetting. In a man's last hour, his memories may swell with the fragrance of his fondest lover. He may remember the shape of the moon on the night he professed his love. But when he tries to place the date, or even his age at the time, the only number that comes to him is a decades-old PIN, embossed on his cerebrum like square digits on a banking card or the LED of an alarm clock.

  They say the devil is in the details, so I search those minutiae, line by line, hollow incantations that summon nothing but guilt and pain.

  I wish there were things I'd forgotten. The rest choose what to forget and don't realize the choice is made until the memory slips away. But there are so many memories in this head. The old world is a boulder, and all that remains is an endless hill. It's a big responsibility, carrying it alone.

  Maybe, then, I owe you this first confession: I'm only writing to convince myself this will be read.

  2

  Fugue

  Jericho pushes two tablets across his desk.

  Back and forth. Into each other. Away from each other.

  There's every reason not to put the tablets in his mouth, not to take it one step further and chew them.

  It's been a good day.

  He sloshes a gulp of water around his bitter mouth, stares at the glass.

  There are no good days.

  He closes his eyes and waits. Half an hour until he leaves Blue Coral Inn.

  Soon he feels it. The walls sink below his weightless body, his blood warms, thoughts fall into a languid mist—-and in walks Maggie.

  Had it already been thirty minutes? Just as time had begun to dissipate, the open door is like a violent injection of black ink in water. All serenity spins toward the open hole.

  Her mouth moves in slow-motion. Drifting through the breaking waves of bliss and saying something he can't hear.

  She settles into a chair.

  Jericho stares at her lips, at the ballpoint pen digging into the corner of her mouth. His desk radio rolls in soft grey waves, a purring, frothing alien water.

  “What?”

  He realizes the radio's lost reception, fumbles with the volume dial. The waves recede. Everything fluid is gone from the room.

  Solid edges, broken silences.

  He studies her face, but can't really see it.

  Here we go.

  She smirks, the pen inching in, and he envisions black ink being sucked down her throat, encasing her skull, twisting from her eyes like blind snakes.

  Tempt the ghosts and they will come.

  With enough focus, the snakes disappear. He knows they're not real.

  She leans in, laughing now, and he forces himself to stare at the details. The real details. Creamy skin, pearly teeth.

  “You are so spacey,” her eyes say, green wildfires scanning him over. The thin feathery lines above them narrow into a squint. Then, throatily, “Let's go to Paseka's tonight.”

  How long had she been talking?

  Feel something.

  “Yeah.” He drags the dull ends of his chewed up nails across the desk, embracing the uneven texture, the wooden veins. They rise like roots under his fingertips. The walls begin to slant.

  Shit. Pull it together.

  He pushes his chair back and reaches to turn the radio fully off, but hits the volume dial and static ether rushes back over the room.

  “No. Exhausted. Didn't get very good sleep...sleep last night. Tomorrow.” It all rolls out fast, sloppy, disjointed.

  She says nothing, exhaling loudly. Right away he remembers—she won't be here tomorrow night.

  That level of focus takes too much effort. He's high, and the ghosts are seizing on this weakened state, banging on his mind's peripheral windowpanes.

  He swallows hard to prepare for a full sentence. “To be honest I might just stay in one of the vacant rooms.”

  “Okay,” you fuck up, “nothing new.” Just the same bastard you were yesterday. “But you know I'll be out of town the next few days.” And I know you don't care.

  “We'll do something then.”

  He hates his indifference. But now he wants her to be gone. She wasn't supposed to come in, he was just supposed to get high and coast through the next few hours, sleep, wake up, repeat. But here she is, interrupting the plan. And the ghosts came with her, as though to say you can't hide from us with your silly little pills.

  “On a Tuesday,” she murmurs. “I'll be back in Caligatha on Tuesday.”

  “I know.”

  “That's not what I meant.” She stands, straightens the name tag on her navy blue dress. “Look, I'll call you tomorrow.”

  He walks her to the door, dizzy. She's talking, but all his attention is spent on standing balanced with even weight on each foot.

  With the salty breeze slipping in his panic recedes. The ghosts are already gone, everything is steady and in place. No more visions he can't control, no slanting walls or veins rippling out of his desk.

  But no high either. That suspended feeling has inverted into a thousand tons. So much weight on each foot.

  “I'm not going to...” She stares at him, probably looking for any sign of his attention. “Just take care of yourself.”

  He goes to say something without knowing what, but she kisses the corner of his mouth, that same spot the pen was drilling into her lip. Then she's gone.

  Blotting the back of his hand on his forehead, he realizes how cold he is.

  God damn it.

  He waits for her to be far enough away, a slow ten-count. Then he rushes to the radio and turns it off in vindication. He resists staring in disbelief at the clock on his desk telling him it's been ninety minutes since he swallowed the pills, just palms the light switch hard on his way out and slams the door.

  The breeze now prickling his skin, he sits on a bench behind his office. It's a short walk from the pier, but he endures the clamor and soon curls up against the wall, watching drums and crates make their way inland through bustling crowds in the distance. A few scattered groups walk by him, and a young couple stops a few feet away for no apparent reason, laughing at each other's attempts to wrangle their mouths around heaping ice cream cones.

  Chittering like mindless, feeding insects. He imagines their stupid faces drowning on the melted goo.

  His own imagination is pure irritability, never as vivid as what the ghosts conjure up. And the ghosts don't care about Maggie or nameless couples on the shore—no, they exist to torture him. Only him.

  Today the ghosts came and left much quicker than usual. A brief reminder of his tenuous grip on sanity.

  There's a pain between his eyes, a flowering bruise. It bleeds with patience into a familiar yellow-white flash lingering in his vision.

  He covers his face and breathes. It's not so bad. He needs to rest, wait out the terrible inverted high.

  In half an hour or an hour, he finds himself at ease, then jerking back awake from a falling dream.

  His eyelid twitches, occasional voices boom in the distance, and an invisible gull or two grumble somewhere nearby.

  His irritability has waned. The smaller, disparate crowds don't bother him anymore.

  He props himself up.

  A new b
illboard a block away stares back at him, a woman in a bikini leering over her dipped sunglasses. They must have put it up this morning. A faceless man, cut off at the ear by the edge of the sign, has his arm around her. GET LOST, it tells him. Strangers laugh in the background, some holding martinis, but the message seems personal. Her eyes are cold. She's not smiling.

  I try, I really do.

  He forces himself to think of Maggie, and how he pushed her away. He shouldn't have panicked and let her ruin his high, shouldn't blame her for it. But that only leads to how he doesn't care.

  But she's right. Or the angry words he imagined simmering in her head were right, anyway.

  There was nothing wrong with her, just how she had come into his life unannounced, like an insect into his bed.

  You asshole. How can you compare her to a louse?

  The gulls sound closer, and like they're arguing.

  I don't mean it like that though.

  “Shut up,” he says to himself.

  He sits, and after his blood redistributes, locks the office door and leaves.

  It's a gray day, hard to tell the sky from the clouds from the water, but the sun will soon set. He's fallen asleep a few times on the bench or in his office, and the walk home along a black sea transforms everything into an empty fishbowl, all loneliness and mirrors.

  An obsidian plane of sea foam is the stuff ghosts are made of, but none would materialize. Once a day is usually it.

  And they aren't real ghosts, anyway. He doesn't think so.

  He looks back at Blue Coral Inn.

  Sleep tight.

  ***

  Back in his apartment, Jericho rolls a cigarette by the open window. It's only about seven, but the sky is a glow of light pollution, a blacklight in the darkness.

  He debates drinking coffee or scotch. Scotch wins out over the remaining week-old wet cement mold of coffee grinds.

  A group of young men, no doubt away on a late holiday, shout at each other. Though he lives in a quiet area, it rests between the beach to the west and the nightlife in the southwest, so drunks are always crossing through.